Kaufmann, Adam

Date: Thursday June 26, 2014
Time: 11:00
Place: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HPF G 6
Host: Tobias Donner/ Tilman Esslinger

Atomic Hong-Ou-Mandel effect in tunnel-coupled optical tweezers

Adam Kaufman
JILA, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

We present recent work in which we demonstrate near-complete control over all the internal and external degrees of freedom of single laser-cooled 87Rb atoms trapped in sub-micron optical tweezers. By dynamically introducing a tunnel-coupling between the tweezers, we implement a massive-particle analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect where atom tunneling plays the role of the photon beamsplitter. The interferometer is used to probe the effect of atomic indistinguishability on the two-atom dynamics for a variety of initial conditions. These experiments demonstrate the viability of the optical tweezer platform for bottom-up generation of low-entropy quantum systems and provide an alternative route toward direct observation of quantum dynamics in tunable finite-sized systems.